Rural and Remote Health is an open-access international academic journal serving rural and remote communities and publishing articles by rural health practitioners, educators, researchers and policy makers.

Health worker productivity is a core determinant of health system performance, especially in low- and middle-income countries where shortages of skilled professionals constrain service availability and quality. Efficient utilization of available working hours is particularly critical in rural and remote settings, where geographic isolation, limited resources, and staffing shortages intensify system pressures. This Original Research study reports on the results of a multi-site time–motion assessment in public and private hospitals, including rural hospitals, across Ethiopia. By quantifying productive and non-productive time and examining associated factors such as experience, training, supervision, and workload, this study provides context-specific insights crucial for informing workforce optimization in Ethiopia’s rural health system.

Musculoskeletal system disorders are one of the leading occupational diseases, and these disorders are mostly observed in factory workers who are likely to do physical labor. The most common causes of these disorders are working with incorrect posture, lifting of heavy objects, and movements that require excessive strength and repetitive loading. Long working hours, insufficient rest hours, depression, and insomnia are among the risk factors that trigger these disorders in workers. This Original Research study evaluates posture disorders, physical activity level, pain, and body awareness in rural factory workers in three provinces of Türkiye.

Access to effective mental health care remains critically limited in low- and middle-income countries, particularly across Sub-Saharan Africa. The Friendship Bench, in which therapy sessions take place in an informal, confidential, and non-stigmatizing space – like a wooden bench – is a well-documented community-based innovation for delivering mental health care in resource-constrained settings. The Friendship Bench was piloted and adapted in rural parts of Zimbabwe and its success has prompted replication and adaptation across various African contexts, where lay health workers and peer counselors have been trained to provide mental health support in both clinical and community settings. This Review identifies and evaluates the implementation strategies, barriers, and facilitators associated with the Friendship Bench model across different African health systems and explores how practices consistent with person-centered care principles (respect, empathy, shared decision-making, tailoring, holistic support, and confidentiality) are described in Friendship Bench implementation studies.

Healthcare organisations’ engagement in research and investment in enhancing research culture has been linked to improved quality of care, including better patient outcomes and more effective care processes. However, engaging in research may be particularly challenging for rural health services because of a limited number of rural researchers, high workloads, lack of organisational support, and lack of targeted research grants and scholarships for rural researchers. Strategies identified to address some of the challenges to undertaking rural health service research include establishing dedicated research support roles within organisations, and fostering networks and collaborations to enhance research capacity. An additional yet underexplored component of these strategies is hosting student researchers in the health service setting. This Original Research study explores key motivations, barriers, enablers, benefits, and burdens of hosting student researchers from the perspective of rural health service staff, and uses these findings to inform the development of an implementation support tool to assist rural health services in becoming hosting organisations.

Sustaining a multidisciplinary allied health workforce of adequate size and skills is a longstanding issue for rural and remote health services, and workforce distribution in Australia remains skewed towards metropolitan areas. Rural Generalist Training Positions (RGTPs) for allied health professions have been trialled in Queensland as a new strategy to improve recruitment, retention and workforce capacity. This Original Research article reports on the largest evaluation of RGTPs in the public sector to date and adds to the emerging body of literature on allied health early-career rural generalist workforce development.